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Customer Relationship Management

The customer experience, or brand experience as I call it, is a critical business component these days. Focusing on the brand experience has become an important way for an organization to achieve success – and differentiate themselves from the competition. What exactly is the brand experience? How does it differ from customer service? And why should your brand be concerned about it? Let’s dive in!

What is ‘Brand Experience‘?

I look at organizations from a holistic perspective, bringing everything the company does into the picture in order to understand how it is performing. I define the brand experience as the sum of all interactions a customer has with a brand. This can include everything from the initial awareness or discovery of a brand, product, or service – progressing through the purchase and use of those products and services. Together these all add up to the critical moments – the touch points – the create an organization’s overall brand experience.

How Operations Affect the Brand Experience

As a brand strategist, I’m often focused on developing a brand that the team clearly understands, believes in, and agrees to live by its values in order to attract, engage and develop deep relationships with its ideal audience. Working through the internal processes are important, but they are only one side of the equation.

Once the team has a solid understanding of the brand, what it stands for and how it works to improve the lives of its customers, the next step is to evaluate how the team processes and handles the customer experience. In other words, the operations and mechanics of the processes in order to deliver a seamless customer experience are just as critical to the overall brand experience.

An example I like to share is Starbucks’ mobile app. The mobile app is a fantastic extension of the Starbucks brand and offers a simple, seamless experience to order, customize, choose a coffeehouse location, and pay for your drinks. However, the coffeehouses sometimes are understaffed and overworked, leading to an operations breakdown.

The mobile app generally provides an estimate of 3 to 8 minutes until your order is ready. There have been times when arriving at a Starbucks to pick up my pre-ordered and paid for coffee, I’ve had to wait an extra 15 minutes plus to get my order, thus hurting the experience I just had with the mobile app.

The operations of the coffeehouse are not aligned to the brand promise made by the mobile app.

I recently ordered a movie from Best Buy to pick up in-store before closing. The online process was simple, seamless, and easy. I received an email immediately letting me know I’d receive a second email when the product was ready to pick up.

At the store, the brand experience quickly fell apart. The product was not at the in-store pickup area as the email stated. The Best Buy employee did not appear to be well-trained, causing me to question if I had purchased the movie or was at the correct store.

Again, the operations did not align with the brand promise from the online experience, which then hurt the overall brand experience.

Operations matter.

What’s the Key Learning From These Stories?

The brand experience moves us beyond the traditional definition of customer service – those individual moments when employees are providing direct service to customers. It’s about the bigger picture of what happens before, during, and after these service interactions.

To truly gain an understanding of customer [brand] experience, you must know that it encompasses every aspect of a company’s offering – from the quality of its customer care to its reputation management, marketing, packaging, product and service features, ease of use, reliability, and beyond.

Three Actions to Improve the Brand Experience

Develop a Shared Purpose – a shared purpose is a clear explanation of what you want the brand experience to at an emotional level. It is the essential foundation on which all other service decisions can be developed. Think of it as combining your vision and mission, explaining to employees why the brand exists and what it stands for. This shared purpose is your primary tool for getting all team members on the same page.

Align Operations to the Brand Experience – many organizations are moving online and with that, they are developing new customer experiences. But what happens when the online experience and the physical experience are tied together, such as with the Starbucks or Best Buy examples? By assessing the brand promise you are making online and aligning it to your operations, you can deliver a consistent, seamless experience to your customers.

Treat Exceptional Service as an Economic Asset – the experience your brand delivers determines the lifetime customer relationships, so the return on investment for providing consistently exceptional service clearly justifies the short-term cost.

Brand experience is about much more than just customer service. It is about fostering employee engagement, truly understanding your customer, and developing a plan for delivering exceptional brand experiences on a consistent basis.

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Your brand promise is much more than what you consistently deliver to your customers. It is a strategic tool that helps determine the future direction of your company.

A brand promise is a strategic tool that communicates to customers what to expect when interacting with your product or services. In this post, we are going to look at how Amazon’s brand promise has become a strategic tool as they pursue new growth goals for their brand.

Amazon’s brand promise is to deliver the broadest selection of products and services at the lowest prices with minimal hassle. Over and over again, Amazon relentlessly reinforces that promise through the experiences of its hundreds of millions of customers who buy over 3.5 billion items each year.

Brand Promise Reinforces Company Direction

Amazon just recently announced that the brand will expand into ocean freight, marking the online retail giant’s latest effort to build out its delivery business. According to the Wall Street Journal, Amazon doesn’t own or operate ships, but is openly acting as a global freight forwarder and third-party logistics provider, categories of companies that book space on ocean vessels and truck goods between ports and warehouses.

In January 2017, Amazon began posting rates for new services such as sorting, labeling, and tracking shipments. These services are typically handled by traditional global freight companies. Going back to Amazon’s promise, the brand is seeking every way possible to deliver a broad selection of products and services to their customers with the least amount of hassle.

By expanding into ocean freight and leasing cargo planes and trucks, Amazon is laying the groundwork for its future plans to one day haul and deliver packages and cargo for others as well as itself. Amazon’s promise to its customers is guiding the strategy forward.

Moving Forward, Full Steam Ahead

Love them or not, Amazon is has a clear vision, promise, mission, and values that they live by. The brand is relentless in their pursuit to offer the broadest selection of products and services and deliver them to their customers with the least hassle. That promise has driven their brand loyalty and trust to the highest levels among online retailers and has provided strategic direction for the brand itself.

People trust Amazon. They know that when they make a purchase on Amazon, they will receive their order on time or before the estimated delivery date. That consistent delivery on the promise that they have upheld is what fuels Amazon’s brand trust and loayal customers.

Best Practices for a Meaningful Brand Promise

A brand promise should be simple, realistic, indicative, and actionable

No more than 10 words – choose words carefully and that have meaning across your brand

Make the promise measurable – tie the promise back to an objective that can be measured. This can then become as a litmus test to confirm, validate, and question the brand’s performance

What’s Your Take?

Do you agree that Amazon is continuing to expand based on their brand promise? How will Amazon improving their logistics and supply chain improve your experience and interaction with the brand? I’d love to hear your thoughts. Connect with me on Twitter or leave a comment below.

Artificial intelligence is becoming mainstream. Brands need to be aware of the tools out there that can enhance the experience they deliver to their customers. Small tasks that can be automated can reduce stress, increase employee morale, and provide a consistent experience to the customer all from a few simple tools.

As I wrote about earlier, artificial intelligence is on the rise and is beginning to disrupt the brand experience. As consumers conduct more research before purchasing, artificial intelligence is started to be deployed to answer questions and help overcome objections. Chatbots via Facebook Messenger is one example of this starting to come into play.

Using these tools can reduce your time while increasing productivity and delivering a consistent brand experience to your customers. Sometimes so smoothly, your customers may mistake an Artificial Intelligence robot for a human being.

Artificial Intelligence Tools to Enhance the Brand Experience

Here are 5 artificial intelligence tools that are changing the brand experience.

1. x.ai

Improve your personal or business brand experience using Amy and Andrew to schedule meetings on your behalf. Amy connects to your calendar and proposes free time based on your availability, then will send out a calendar invite once an agreement on time and place has been met.

Amy will even learn your favorite places for coffee or lunch and will add those to your meetings. I’d love to see that feature paired with mobile ordering for food or coffee. What an amazing experience that would be to show up to your neighborhood Starbucks and have your coffee ordered and waiting for you by Amy on your behalf.

2. Clearbit Connect

This tool closes the gap when it comes to networking. Most of the time, after connecting with someone at an event, it can be hard to follow up with them if they don’t have a business card or scribbled and email address down on a scrap of paper and now you are deciphering letters using Photoshop to try and string together an address that might possibly be the person you spoke to the other night.

Enter Clearbit Connect. It is a Gmail plugin that finds the right email address for the people you are trying to reach out to. It shows you their LinkedIn profile, company information and other useful facts that you can use when you connect with them next.

Talk about a better brand experience!

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3. LeadCrunch

LeadCrunch’s goal is to provide highly targeted prospects based on data from your existing customers. It uses your customers’ industry, revenue size, number of employees, to build a profile and generate a set of targets. Fancy.

5. Crystal

We all write emails to people we don’t know very well. Finding the right words to resonate on the other end is something everyone struggles with. Crystal providing advice on how to write emails tailored to the individual you are writing to. The app connects with your LinkedIn and email to build a personality profile of your contacts, then advises you on the tone and wording of your emails.

5. Octane AI

How your team interacts and communicates with potential customers is crucial to them becoming immersed with your brand. When customers interact with brands online, it can feel like a one-sided, long-form search of trying to find a frequently asked questions page that might answer your question.

Octane AI is the easiest way to create a chatbot that can help drive sales, capture leads, increase engagement and provide a consistent brand experience for your customers.

The Tools of the Trade Include Artificial Intelligence

Whether you realize it or not, artificial intelligence is now becoming a mainstream tool to help brands work more efficient, connect with more prospects, and ultimately help more people. Using some or all of the tools mentioned in this article can help improve the brand experience you provide your audience, and improve internal operations.

<what’s Your Take?

How do you view artificial intelligence and how it enhances the brand experience? Leave a comment below and let me know!

Keeping up and staying competitive means knowing what technology is going to cause change in the coming years. And better yet, how to apply it to your brand strategy.

With the world constantly changing, it can be hard to predict what’s to come. With the rise of automated technology being able to perform once human-only tasks at increasing speed, the future can feel uncertain. However, if we look at the current technology in use today, we can find some clarity on where the future is headed. And what that means for the future of brand strategy.

Immersive Experiences

Brands have been shifting towards developing and delivering exceptional experiences. Some brands have been providing amazing experiences for the past half-century. Brands such as Disney, Delta, and Starbucks all fit this model. Other brands offer more of a transactional experience, leaving a gap in the brand-customer relationship. As technology continues to become more interactive with both virtual and augmented reality coming to market, brands have an opportunity to enhance and develop new, more engaging customer experiences. Think of the evolution from screens and laptops to glasses (Google Glass, Snap glasses) with a heads-up disply attached to your mobile phone providing you all the daily information desired.

How This Applies to Brand Strategy
From a brand strategy perspective, this is an incredible opportunity. Technology is advancing to allow seemingly any industry the capability to present data in new ways for their customers. Augmented reality, think Pokemon Go, is the next step to transforming experiences that otherwise may include a number of cumbersome steps.

While this technology is still new on the market, be thinking about applications and accessories that your company could help pioneer to jump on the latest technology trend over the next 2-3 years.

Self-Deleting Apps

Cyber attacks, data being held for ransom through malware, and the growing number of data breaches has brought a lot of uncertainty and fear to the internet. Encryption and disposable communication are increasing in popularity as consumers are looking for ways to protect themselves and their confidential information.

How This Applies to Brand Strategy
From a brand strategy perspective, this not only applies to your customers by ensuring that their data is secure and safe, but also is critical to your employees well-being. Human resource related issues, exchanging financial information, and social security numbers are all critical areas that need to be secure. Technologies such as Dust (mobile app that destroys all records of message after a period of time or on opening) are inexpensive and offer a solid solution.

As you think about the culture, values, and ethics of the brand you are shaping, consider what senstive transactions are performed daily and how encrypted or self-deleting apps could help keep aligned with your brand’s values and principles.

Big Data for Everyone

As more and more companies are coming online, there is a growing list of web based social media marketing tools or sales workflow automation via software as a service, or SaaS. These services make up the term “big data” that is typically reserved for research scientists and corporations.

As more companies invest in these technologies, two things happen: the cost goes down and sophistication goes up. There is an opportunity for small and micro companies to take advantage of big data, tailoring solutions via the many platforms available online.

How This Applies to Brand Strategy
From the brand strategy perspective, understanding big data and using it to enhance brand experiences can create an intimate relationship with your customers. Tailroing and personalizing an online experience through marketing automation and predictive analytics allows brands to design experiences that customers will enjoy and want to come back to.

Closing Thoughts

There is a big opportunity to take advantage of the emerging technology and tailor it to your brand strategy. How your brand decides to enhance their products, services, events, and/or experiences will depend on the values, beliefs, and principles that guide the organization. While we can’t predict the future, we can understand the next wave of technology and how it can be applied to brand strategy to improve the customer experience.

What do you think about the emerging technology trends? How will it affect your brand strategy? How will you begin to take advantage of the technology to be prepared when it hits mainstream? Leave a comment below or tweet me on Twitter @BWarsinske.